A great talent portrays life rather than what is alive...
Art is never to be appreciated except in its relation to ideal beauty...
Literature is the expression of society.
Art springs and breathes from the air of the age in which it is born. The artist is the result, or rather, the synthesis of the general spirit of the society in which he lives.
The poetry of life: it is obvious that every thing has its secret touch of poetry, its song. To feel it is a great gift... To clear a smile from the beauty of this world and give it eternal expression, to untie from the chaos of time the moment through which one can look into eternity is not to increase with it the light, the charm, the powers of human life ?
The artist presents us the world, the life seen and lived by him, through the so-called temperamental prism of his...
Only art has the faculty of choice in its creation. Nature why can. The artist gives what he wants as much as he can. This is why it has been rightly said that art corrects nature...
And, indeed, it is not the views of nature and life that are the object of art, but the intimate meaning of these views, the soul and harmony that emerges even from things that seem to us dead and devoid of any order...
To know how to extract the secret of this great life, which circulates throughout nature and whose pulse beats everywhere, to know how to extract what is emotional even from what seems indifferent to us, to know how to capture the steady logic and universal harmony in this disorder of aspects, which makes us dizzy and troubled, is to have the eyes and feeling of an artist.
Art is also one of the forms that life takes on...
There is no true poetry without great wisdom.
The true and new Creator tears apart the known laws with the pickaxe of his temper. Every artist must be the bringer of other principles, descending into the concert of lightning from Mount Sinai with the tablets of new logic in his hands.
Art is a treasure that escapes only after an effort, a resistance, a struggle.
Above the individual pulse stands the pulse of the age. There is a social background that fertilizes the style of the artist in the style of the time. The artworks are projected onto a contemporary wall.
The diversion of thought through word, the gliding in a milky way of images, this is what constitutes the very azure tool of the craft of writing.
All literature is primarily interiority. But not simply interiority. The writer not only mirrors the outer world into the inner world more markedly than is currently the case in practical life (dominated by patterns of behavior). But it adds a new character to this revelation, that of being proposed to communication.
The artist, far from feeling rigidly circumscribed in his own era, resolves his troubling existence of the ephemeral through the prophetic projection that remains open to him, thanks to the historical ideal, intrinsic to the nature of duration, the essence of historical life that flows and moves forward...
The historical ideal opens to the artist both the present and the direction of his movement. The artist cannot feel shackled in contemporaneity, but is permanently free to adhere to the progress of things, not in the sense of an arbitrary fantasy, but by discovering the organic meaning of movement, determined by the world and society of his contemporary...
The grandeur of an age is given by its deeds, as well as by the vehemence of the vision of its historical ideal, realities in which all the antennae of literature and art are immersed, as in their element.
We forget that the present can just as well be considered eternal, that eternity can be conceived in the sphere of an action, a work of art, not because it lasts forever, but because the action is great and the work of art perfect... Let's transform for these reasons our life in a work of art, and we will be able to boldly claim that we are immortal even from this earth...
All that is perfect, that is, that which constitutes art, is eternal and imperishable, even if the blind hand of time extinguishes its spark again... A perfect work of art carries eternity within it... By virtue of this fact, even if it extinguishes and worlds perish, the soul of all great deeds, of all poetic and artistic creations lives on. In the perfection of art we see embodied, in its purest and most beautiful form, the dreamed image of paradise, of an undefiled happiness.
The creator of the work of art of the future is none other than the artist of the present, the one who foresees the life of the future and longs to be incorporated into it. He who feeds this longing in himself from his most intimate aptitude, lives from now on in a better life; but only one being is capable of this: the artist.
Man is a poet in two ways, by contemplation and by communication...
The natural gift of poetry gives man the ability to condense the phenomena that manifest outside his senses into an inner image; the artistic one, on the other hand, to communicate this image again outside.
The miracle in poetic works differs from the miracle in religious dogma in that it does not suspend the nature of things, as the latter does, but, on the contrary, makes them intelligible to feeling...
For the impression produced by his message, the creative intelligence in the poem is not at all concerned with belief, but with affective understanding.
Musical language is the beginning and end of spoken language, as feeling is the beginning and end of intellect, myth the beginning and end of history, Lyric the beginning and end of poetic art. The intermediate between the beginning and the center point, as well as between it the exit point is fantasy.
The height of art is to make alive what is lifeless, to tame what is wild.
For there to be great poets, there must also be great listeners.
A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament. Its beauty comes from the fact that its author is what it is.